Gizmo5 is writing to let you know that we will no longer be providing service starting on April 3, 2011. A week from today, March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to add credit to your account.

Although the standalone Gizmo5 client will no longer be available, we have since launched the ability to call phones from within Gmail at even more affordable rates.

So they bought it so they could kill it. (Folding standalone, not to mention natively mobile applications, into a web application that still relies on platform-specific browser plugins qualifies as “killing,” I think. Or at least replacing it with a less fully-featured solution. And maybe they didn’t specifically buy it so they could kill it, but that’s the effective outcome regardless.)

What would it have cost them to actually release the fully native applications they had developed? Did Google really need to spend $30 million on Gizmo5 just to get in-browser calling functionality? I mean, I hear they have some pretty talented engineers—surely they could’ve done this in-house if they really wanted.

Comments (0) | Geekish